


Return to Camp Stillwater

by creatureofhobbit



Category: Dead of Summer (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-28
Updated: 2018-08-28
Packaged: 2019-07-03 13:26:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15819789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creatureofhobbit/pseuds/creatureofhobbit
Summary: Blair and Drew want to reopen Camp Stillwater again; Jessie thinks it's a terrible idea.





	Return to Camp Stillwater

As the coach took her slowly towards her destination, Jessie thought about the last time she’d come here, looking forward to spending time with her friends again, Blair, Joel, Cricket, Alex, Blotter, and getting a bit of space between her and her mother. This year, with every mile she got closer to Camp Stillwater, all she wanted to do was turn around and run right back to Manhattan.

Maybe it wasn’t too late to convince them it was a bad idea, she thought. But then she’d already tried that, right back when they first contacted her about it, and neither of them had taken any notice back then….

They had to be kidding, Jessie thought when she first opened Blair’s e-mail. After everything that had happened, Blair and Drew were seriously contemplating opening Camp Stillwater again?

“I know what you’re thinking,” Blair began when she called him to ask about it, “but it’s going to be different now. Amy’s gone. It can be a fresh start for the camp, with me and Drew in charge, it can be the camp Deb always planned to run. The place means a lot to me and Drew, since it’s the place where we first met and got together.” Jessie was silent at this, and then heard Drew in the background saying “It’s where she and Garrett met too, dumbass.”

“You probably won’t even get any campers,” Jessie had tried. “Camp Stillwater’s the ghost story told around the campfire at every other camp in America. I don’t know if anyone will want to go there.”

“We already have some people interested,” Blair had replied. “You remember Tony, right? We managed to persuade him to come back as a counsellor.”

Tony? Jessie wondered, before remembering Anton Melnikov, the camper who Alex had befriended and advised to call himself Tony to make it easier for him to fit in with the other campers. She had to admit she wouldn’t have expected him to return; he had, after all, been the one who was haunted by the visions of the tall man only to find he wasn’t believed, and had been the butt of the jokes of his fellow campers until Alex had taught him to stand up for himself.

“And besides, we weren’t even sure we were going to keep the name Stillwater,” Drew went on, taking the phone from Blair. “A new name might be the fresh start the camp needs.”

“So what’s it going to be?” Jessie had snapped. “Camp Malphas?”

Blair had ended the call at that point, seeing that she wasn’t in a frame of mind to even consider going back there. But the next day, Drew had sent Jessie an email complete with a mockup of a brochure they planned to use to market the camp, with a welcome speech so reminiscent of the one Deb Carpenter had given back when they were all there, and a list of planned activities, lots of photos. He’d even sent a sketch of a possible new logo for the camp, in the name of Camp Carpenter, saying he was considering naming the camp after Deb. “It really is going to be a different place,” he’d said. “Wouldn’t you like to be a part of that? Take away all the bad memories of Camp Stillwater, make it the fun place for kids that it always used to be. Will you join us?”

Against her better judgement, Jessie had agreed. But as the camp drew ever closer, she wasn’t sure she had made the right decision.

 

In a way it felt wrong, Jessie thought, as she painted over the graffiti which had been on the cabin walls since the 1980s. _Cricket likes to stick it in her hand._ It felt almost as though Jessie was obliterating her friends from existence as she painted out all the reminders of them, and yet at the same time, she didn’t want to think of them like that, wanted to hold on to the good memories of them. Better to think about the time Alex got his yearbook out and they’d all sat around laughing and joking about their time together as campers. Jessie knew Blair had brought his, so she leafed through that, focused on things like the time Blotter had got into trouble for trying to sneak into the girls’ cabin, or Alex’s tactic for making people think they had wet themselves that he had later taught Anton Melnikov. 

She wouldn’t think about 1989, about Amy.

But that was easier said than done.

 

This is insane, Jessie thought as she found herself scanning the faces of all the campers and counsellors, not even knowing what she was looking for. It wasn’t like she was going to see anything anyway. It hadn’t been possible to tell with Amy at first, and although Jessie admitted she had never really liked her, she hadn’t suspected that. Why would she? Demons were a story people shared around the campfire, not who you sat next to. (“Because supernatural rules apply to Amy?” Alex had joked the day after she got struck by lightning, and at the time, Jessie had just taken it as him laughing at Joel for his constant movie references. And that had to be what it was. Alex couldn’t have known. But it bothered Jessie now remembering it.) 

As far as Jessie was concerned at the start of that summer, Amy was just this irritating little blonde who was taking all the guys’ attention from herself and Cricket, calling Garrett by his first name as though she actually knew him, leading Alex on right under Cricket’s nose. And then that day when Jessie had got Cricket to tell Deb that her grandmother had died so she could have the night off, and Amy had come over with her cookies and her sympathy, in that moment Jessie had felt like she was a bad person for having told the lie. 

Cricket had even tried to argue with Jessie, saying that Amy wasn’t so bad, and that maybe it was Jessie’s conscience that was causing her to react that way to her. Jessie had brushed Cricket off, not wanting to admit that she might be right. But knowing what she knew now, Jessie wondered if there had been signs even then of the evil inside Amy, signs that she could have seen if she had looked harder. Instead, she’d been too busy making digs at Drew once she’d figured out he was Andrea, pretending she’d borrowed Joel’s camera to film him in the shower. Looking back at the person she was back then, it was no wonder everyone had thought of her as the bitch and no one had thought anything bad of Amy.

“I don’t remember you in that way, Jessie,” Drew had said when she’d brought it up. “I remember you as the one who brought me back, who convinced me to make it work with Blair. And I remember that you were the one who was there for me when Blair reacted badly to it. I think even back then, as Andrea, I never hated you. If anything, I envied the way you were so confident, and fitted in. But the way you came to accept me for who I was, just as eventually Blair did….that convinced me that you were someone I wanted to be friends with. And that’s what Blair and I want from this camp now.”

This was stupid. She was acting just as crazy, the way she was scrutinising everyone, watching for signs that they were possessed. Amy was gone, Jessie didn’t need to worry about her any more. 

She watched as Tony went over and approached an Eastern European camper, and wondered if he was befriending that kid in the same way that Alex had befriended him; (if there’s any reports of wet beds in their cabin, he’s taught them Alex’s trick, Blair had whispered) and she watched this other camper taking movie footage of his friends, and thought about how he would have probably had a friend in Joel. “So, what do you think Joel would have thought of smartphones?” she asked, and Drew said “He’d have liked them, but I think Joel would have still preferred to use his camera. He’d get better quality footage with that.”

Blair snorted. “Better quality view of Deb’s ass.” The three of them laughed together.

Then Jessie turned towards the counsellors, saw someone with long blonde hair half way down her back, looking as if she was on the edge of the rest of the crowd, wanting to fit in. She knew it wasn’t possible, that it couldn’t be her, but that didn’t stop Jessie from running over in her direction, yelling “Amy?”

The girl turned around. “Sorry? Were you talking to me?”

Now that Jessie saw her face, she realised that this girl looked nothing like Amy, her face was narrower, her eyes a slightly darker colour, and this girl was a little taller than Amy, too. Blair and Drew had come over by this time.

“Jessie, this is Lucy, she’s come to join us from Maine.”

Lucy was frowning. “Who’s Amy?”

“Amy was here a long time ago when Blair and I were counsellors here,” Drew explained, taking Lucy by the arm and leading her back towards the others.

“Wait a second, I think I heard about Amy,” someone else started to say, before Drew took her by the arm and said something to her about needing help with tidying the arts and crafts cabin and she was just the person for the job. Checking that Lucy was in the middle of a conversation, Blair took Jessie by the arm, led her away.

“It’s okay, Jessie,” said a voice at her elbow, and Jessie realised it was Tony who had spoken. “No one’s here. No Amy, no tall man, nobody. Just us staff.”

“He’s right,” Blair agreed. “Amy’s really gone. You don’t need to worry about her any more.”

If Tony thought there was no one there, Jessie supposed she had to give that some credibility: he had been the one who the tall man had been able to communicate with last time, so if he was going to speak with anyone again, Tony was likely to be that person. She had to believe him, to accept that Blair and Drew could achieve their goal to make the camp what Deb Carpenter had wanted it to be.

But that scene just now, where she’d mistaken Lucy for Amy…Maybe she shouldn’t be there to try and help them do that.

 

“Thought we might find you here.”

Tony, Blair and Drew approached Jessie, at the bench where so many years ago, she and Garrett had carved their nicknames: Townie + Braces.

“All the time I’d been focusing on funny stories about Alex, or Blotter, or Joel, or even worrying about another Amy, I hadn’t been letting myself think about him,” Jessie admitted. “I guess it was just too hard. I was so scared of another Amy that I just ended up scaring Lucy. I shouldn’t be here.”

“You know, I remember that summer, when you carved that,” Blair said, as if she hadn’t spoken. “I remember how Garrett really didn’t want to be there, how he was angry at his father for sending him, how he wouldn’t even speak to him that day he came to camp for Joel’s brother. And I remember how you were the one who got him joining in, how you and he worked together to win the Capture the Flag contest. That’s exactly what we want for this camp, and that’s why we asked you to join us.”

“He’s telling you the same thing,” Tony spoke up.

“Wait.” Jessie turned towards him. “You saw him?”

“I see him right now,” Tony replied. “He says there’s nothing happening here now. It’s going to be the summer that Blair and Drew want for the camp.” And for the first time, Jessie allowed herself to believe that might be true.


End file.
